Or is my perception entirely mistaken?
Okay, here's something I have some in-depth knowledge on. I'm painting with a broad brush, but I'll try to close with some primary source materials. I'll be focusing on the PNW.
in the era pre WWI, union membership and western harvesting went hand in hand - there had been an enormous countrywide Depression of 1882 - 1885 that depressed prices, even as production increased. and the exponential increase in housing and factory production in the Northwest created a huge demand for Western Red Cedar and other logging products for homes and ships. The red cedar was especially notable as it's usefulness for siding and roofing, and the Shingleweavers union was a big driver of subsidiary organizing. This period of massive explosion of physically extractive industries changed significantly with the beginning of the first world war, which in one moment raised the steel and manufacturing industries while lowering the comparable demand for lumber. I won't dip into the anti-labor maneuvers of WW1 purchasing, but sufficed to say, the existence of the war was used to paint any labor organizing as anti-patriotic.
In 1886 white labor, organized by Peter Peyto Good, a great, great, great great granduncle of mine, helped to round up Chinese labor and stick them on a train to Tacoma and then Portland, where they might have been massacred by the Knights of Labor. My point being that the Labor movement had strong pro-White sentiments. I was reading a primary source about Canadian lumber unions begging them to not-exclude the non-white worker, but to organize and enroll them into the unions. Sadly, that is NOT the direction they went. I'll have to look when I'm back in my office, but I believe it was about the continued exclusion of Asian and Hispanic laborers, as the great exodus of African American labor to the northwest hadn't really begun yet.
So coming into the pre-world-1 era,
"Ferocious racial exclusion characterized the AFL movement during the secon and third decades of the 20th century. Of more than 100 locals with the city's Central Labor Council in the period, only 9 ever admitted workers of African or Asian descent on any terms. Exclusionary mechanisms ranged from informal blackballing of prospective members to explicit racial or citizenship codes embedded in the constitutions of the international unions with which the locals were affiliated. Those who were admitted in every instance occupied subservient positions within their locals. In some cases they were admitted as single individuals, tokens; in others they were discriminated in the dispatching of work; and in all but one they were blocked from holding office. Many white workers in the AFL, moreover, in particular, those in the restaurant unions - used the mechanism of trade union solidarity to attempt to drive Asian-American workers out of the labor market altogether.
My argument here is that by wrapping the albatross of White Labor around their necks, they very specifically created their own scab workforces who would undermine their efforts to create solidarity.
The GSS was a wide barreled gun pointed at... what? Look on page 92 of the Friedheim article below - people OUTSIDE the strike both intentionally and unintentionally spread stories that the strikers had dynamited the water supply dam, assassinated the mayor, and, what wasn't in dispute is that the Executive Committee of the strike wouldn't leave union engineers in Seattle City Light for provision of power and light to even the hospitals. Union organizers - nearly 110 unions of greater and smaller organizing capacities - worried that they were spending their political capital without a lot of return, and they were.
So Ole Hale breaks the strike, sort of indirectly - he blames bolshevism, hired 1500 police and national guard to 'quell disorder' even though there wasn't any disorder, and runs a propaganda campaign against this big strike which had some very vague goals.
Coming out of the GSS, Ole Hale, mayor of Seattle, goes out and makes a fortune (compared to his mayoral salary) lecturing on the dangers of Bolshevism.
Nationally, the Senate turned from German spies to Bolshevism after the strike was announced and before it began; the day the strike ended they held hearings filled with the atrocities of Bolshevism, on the dangers of domestic sympathizers, and the Seattle Strike fit perfectly into a framework that delegitimized the labor movement in general.
So in conclusion, the labor movement began by creating it's own scab pool by refusing to include a LARGE portion of the available membership, and then the changing fortunes of WWI changed the political landscape in a way that was explicitly used as a whip against labor, AND it weakened the economic landscape of the extractive industries that had created the conditions that led to the initial surge of NW labor. After the Great Seattle Strike, a lot of the air was sucked out of the room and they were painted as unamerican Bolsheviks going into the next 20 years, and leading to the big labor transitions of WWII.
I'll look for that tradesman newspaper article arguing to the union why they should include non-white labor. It was round 1909 in British Columbia.
Frank, D. (1994). Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915-1929. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 86(1), 35-44. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40491512
Friedheim, R. (1961). The Seattle General Strike of 1919. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 52(3), 81-98. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40487648
Post Now featuring paragraphs!!
Your perception is not mistaken. The decline of the American union is a widely documented phenomenon, although the answer as to why it has been and continues to be in a decline is a slightly more complex conversation. First I think it is worth establishing what an active organized labor movement looks like.
Most labor historians like to fixate on the 1930s and 40s as really the only period of American labor history worth extensively discussing, and that the history before that period was merely a prologue to the heyday of the New Deal labor movement. I personally think the 1865-1925 era of labor history is just as important because it represents a much different style of labor relations in America, and what I mean by that is the degree to which violence and open hostilities defined the movements, both on the side of labor and on the side of capital. This era is filled with examples of labor disputes that can only be characterized as open warfare.
In perhaps the first great American strike, the so called Great Railroad Strike, was in reality a series of loosely connected strikes of both the state and local level. What is important about this strike is the sheer magnitude with which State and Industry responded. When you hear people say that once upon a time the Army was used to break strikes, this is the strike they are talking about. When being prevented from interfering with a local strike in Baltimore "The militia fired into the crowd, killing twelve and wounding eighteen". In Pittsburgh after the local militias joined the strikers a militia from Philadelphia was brought in and after they were taunted by a crowd at the train station "fired into it, killing twenty men, women, and children and wounding twenty-nine". To quote a solider who witnessed the events in Pittsburgh "I served in the war of the rebellion (the civil war) and have seen wild fighting... but a night of terror such as last night I never experienced before and hope to God I never will again". In Chicago, after newspapers proclaimed the city was under control of "communists" a cavalry charge killed twelve and wounded forty. (All quotes in the above section were taken from Labor's Untold Story by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais).
So as you can see, a strike in the 19th century was akin to open warfare. The Great Rail strike is an extraordinary example due to its scope, but such events were all to common on smaller scales throughout the country. Some you might know of are the Pullman Strike and the Homestead Strike. Other smaller scale tactics include the arrest and legal murder of strikers and strike leaders as was seen in Pennsylvania in the case of the infamous/famous Molly Maguires, I want to move on from this era but a good quick work on the Mollys is The Molly Maguires by Anthony Bimba and I suggest it. Long story short, during a strike in Pennsylvania coal country Irish labor leaders were railroaded to their deaths, their names are: Thomas Munley, James Carroll, James Roarity, James Boyle, Thomas Duffy, Kelly, Campbell, "Yellow Jack" Donahue,Thomas Fisher, John "Black Jack" Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, Patrick Tully, Peter McManus, Dennis Donnelly, Martin Bergan, James McDonnell and Charles Sharpe. Those executions are some of the most infamous labor deaths in American history and I suggest you look into their story further, but I'm going to move on to the 1930s now.
So, by the 1930s the all out street warfare during labor disputes had largely become a thing of the past. Not completely mind you. Street brawls and extremely violent reprisals against strikers were still common, but it wouldn't have been an "ah shit we accidentally burnt down the entire city" type of thing. One of the most notable examples I can think of off the top of my head is "Bloody Friday" in Minneapolis where 4 striking Teamsters were killed and some 20 others wounded by police using sawed off shotguns at point blank ranges. But now let's start to actually answer your question in a more direct way.
As you saw above, the relation between Capital and Labor during the 19th and early 20th century was less then pleasant to say the least. The common stance taken by Capital at the time essentially amounted to a zero tolerance policy towards unions. If you tried to strike during that era you almost guaranteed the death of at least one striker and injuries to countless others. Lets not forget, this was the same time that in Europe events such as the Paris Commune were happening/ just having happened so its not like this was a uniquely American thing. But by the time the 1930s role around the government put some what of a leash on Capital, and federal forces are most certainly not going to be used as a significant strikebreaking force any more. National guard units do get used time to time but certainly not to mow down strikers in the streets, the only real notable example I can think of is the Colorado Labor Wars, which were just that a war, but that's another story and rather unique to the mining industry. Even as early as 1902 Teddy Roosevelt was using the Federal Government to force arbitration between Capital and Labor. By the time FDR is in office things are looking up for labor.
The Wagner act gets passed in 1935 which among other things essentially legalizes the union in America. One thing that you need to know about this era compared to the former is that unions are now legitimate in the sense that they are largely no longer Revolutionary with an uppercase R organizations. Unions are directly interacting with the Government through structures such as the NLRB. With the death of the IWW in the early 1920s unions are now looking to reform labor in America rather than radically change it. Of course this is much more of an ambiguous statement as it might seem. Yes, the Communist Party at this point was on the scene and incredibly active, and yes they held close ties to Moscow and the Third International, but, and that is both a big and small but, the labor movement was not looking to engage in street warfare with the Capital classes...for the time being. Sure the ideology of the Communist Party called for drastic changes, including eventual revolution, but the unions of this era can not be, in my opinion, considered Revolutionary Bodies. It was simply a matter of the circumstances of the times that a strike in the 1930s and 1940s was looking to keep people employed for good wages rather then tear down the wage system.
There have been some great answers so far discussing unionizing from the late Nineteenth Century up to 1950! I will try to build on those answers and discuss post-World War II unions. There are a couple big trends that we need to consider in the post-war US. First, is broader economic changes. The bulk of labor organizing in the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century occurred in the midst of industrialization. The US's shift from an industrial economy to a service-based economy had many implications for the labor movement. Changes within structures of capital ownership as a result of globalization are also important to note. Societal shifts related to gender, race, and immigration are also significant. Second, is internal changes in the organized labor movement. u/AdhesivenessLow630 is partially correct in that unions are coasting on their pre-war gains, but I think there is much more that can be said about the internal changes that unions undergo in the face of larger social changes in the 1960s and 1970s. PATCO is in many ways the response to a decades-long change within labor organizing. In many ways, we see an organized labor movement attempting to respond to broader economic, political, and social changes, but largely unable to do so.
First, we have to reckon with the broader economic and social changes of the postwar period. There are three big shifts I want to mention. The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most significant moments of 20th-Century U.S. History, but it also affected the labor movement. Except for a couple of professions (longshoremen, pullman porters, and coal miner, for example) the labor movement was heavily segregated prior to World War II (as noted by u/deadletter and u/Drugs_and_Anarchy). Important union protections, like closed shops and union seniority, were also used to exclude black workers from certain professions. Black workers were thus more likely to be stuck in low-paying jobs that also lacked union protection. Paul Frymer argues that NAACP lawyers worked hard throughout the 1950s and 1960s to get black workers access to union-protected jobs.^(1) In order to do so, they often had to force unions to accept racial equality in court. These legal efforts also undermined these important protections. By the late 1960s and 1970s, black workers are entering unions en masse, but corporate powers also use these new openings to undermine the power of unions. It is important to note that NAACP lawyers didn't want to undermine the labor movement. They actually viewed unions as vital to black labor interests and racial equality. The undermining of closed shops and seniority were an unfortunate side effect of divided movements of racial and class equality that had been torn apart by early Cold War rhetoric of red baiting and anti-communism.
The globalization of capital is also a very important part of the post-war period. Jefferson Cowie illustrates the ways that companies began to move from heavily-unionized communities to less unionized areas.^(2) In order to cut costs, companies began to move towards the less-unionized South in the mid-1900s. As the CIO fought to unionize the South, companies began to shift internationally. By the 1970s, many industrial employers had shifted production outside of the USA entirely. Capital moves, but communities are fixed. Much of the unionization efforts of the early 1900s are undermined by the mobility of capital in the postwar period. Also important is the conglomeration of corporations into multinational bodies. One example is the coal industry. In the late 1970s, many coal companies are bought up by larger energy conglomerates like Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon.^(3) This undermined the relationship between labor and capital that had been established back in the Treaty of Detroit in 1950. Corporations became less responsive to labor and more willing to encroach upon established labor protections.
Part of this process of globalization was the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy. As industrial jobs shifted beyond the US, the nature of labor itself was transformed. As noted earlier, most of the labor movement was concentrated in industrial labor. This left the largest-growing sector of the economy beyond the reach of the labor movement. Judith Stein also argues that this shift from industry to service and finance weakened unions, led to economic deregulation, and strengthened free trade policies.^(4)
As we see, organized labor faced a number of challenges in the postwar period, and it has tried to respond to many of these changes. One big change in organized labor was the incorporation of both African Americans and women. Lane Windham shows us that the many unions saw their numbers grow in the 1970s.^(5) Many established unions saw formerly-excluded workers join en masse following the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Many new unions were also established in service-sector fields like grocery stores and department stores. Many unions also changed their tactics in response to changing ownership structures. For example, the United Mine Workers of America shifted from more traditional striking tactics to community-wide civil disobedience. In strikes against AT Massey and Pittston in the 1980s and 1990s, the UMWA drew upon the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement rather than traditional striking tactics.^(6) Many unions also changed internally. Once again looking at the UMWA, we see the rise of an internal union democracy movement. Gone were the days of John Lewis's autocratic rule over the union. A faction called the Miners for Democracy emerged, but their strongest supporter Joseph Yablonski and his family were murdered in 1969. From this example, we see many internal divisions within labor unions caused by the broader social, political, and economic changes of the postwar period. Divisions also sharpened over issues like women's employment and immigration.
More recently, the weakened labor movement has tried to reorient itself to a globalized labor market. Annelise Orleck describes more recent organizing efforts like OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15.^(7) Although much different than traditional labor unions, these organizations gesture towards a form of labor organization that can contend with the new nature of global capital. Labor organizing of undocumented workers is also increasingly important. Movements and events like Justice for Janitors and A Day Without Immigrants are efforts to educate the public and affect federal policy about immigration.
This is a long answer and it may be too rambling, but in short, labor and capitalism have transformed drastically since 1945. Globalization, Civil Rights, and the decline of American industry have forced labor unions to devise new strategies and contend with some of the underlying issues of racism and sexism within the traditional labor movement. Certainly PATCO can be seen as the end of a successful period of industrial labor organizing, but attempts have been made since 1980 to keep unions alive and create new labor organizations that can respond to the new nature of global capital.
The range of answers in this thread so far points to how multifaceted this issue is. However so far there has not been much talk about the 1970s and 80s, and I want to talk about that. As far as sources, I am pulling significantly from Jeff Cowie's "Stayin' Alive,” as well as Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" and a handful of other sources for which I don't have books on hand at the moment, but have tried to provide citation for with relevant statistics and news articles.
As /u/AdhesivenessLow630 points out, Taft-Hartley dealt a massive blow to labor militancy. Yet in the 1950s and 60s labor enjoyed the bounty that had been won in the 30s and 40s, and was able to make gains in some areas. The Teamsters Union saw significant gains in this era, spreading national labor standards for their industry that culminated in the National Master Freight Agreement in 1964. AFL-CIO president George Meany was a national political figure, being the primary backer of 1968 Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon, according to Rick Perlstein, refused to directly attack labor, a lesson learned after having performed poorly in his duties whipping votes for the 1958 midterms campaigning on right-to-work(Perlstein 49-50).
Nonetheless, you did not see the same sort of combative strikes happening in the 50s and 60s that you saw in the prior decades. This began to change in the late 60s and early 70s. Quoting Cowie, “In 1970 alone there were over 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale work stoppages, thirty-four massive stoppages of ten thousand workers or more, and a raft of wildcats, slowdowns, and aggressive stands in contract negotiations.”
The late 60s through the 1970s represented a crisis of American society and American capitalism not seen since the 40s. The war in Vietnam radicalized a significant portion of the population and the American labor movement, alienating them from their pro-war leadership. The civil rights movement saw significant challenges to the segregated labor arrangement talked about by /u/deadletter - MLK was famously gunned down while supporting black Memphis sanitation workers in their strike to have their union recognized and receive better working conditions. This period also saw rising inflation and the beginning of an economic slowdown that in the 70s would become widely known as stagflation.
Stagflation's causes are wide-ranging and still debated (Nixon’s wage and price controls, the oil crisis, increased consumer spending, increased international manufacturing competition, etc.), but the results are better known. Profits fell, factories began to close, and the economy of 70s America began to shrink.
Inflation, and eventually stagflation when it was identified as such, was a major concern for America's political leadership. One of Gerald Ford’s first acts after pardoning Nixon was pushing the WIN campaign - Whip Inflation Now! - as inflation that year stood at 12.3 percent. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/28/AR2006122801002.html) This concern continued with Jimmy Carter, who's presidency was stalked by the issue as the Iranian oil embargo worsened the economy.
To right the ship, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979. Volcker sought to combat inflation through an aggressive regime of federal interest rate hikes, raising borrowing rates from 11% to 17% within 6 months of Volcker taking office. (https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/economic_quarterly/1993/winter/pdf/goodfriend.pdf) This interest rate hike reduced bank lending, resulting in a liquidity crunch that reduced investment in construction projects, farm loans, and manufacturing. The national unemployment rate climbed from 6% in 1979 to 11% in 1982 when these measures were ended. (https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506)
The effects of the Volcker shock on union attitudes can be seen in negotiations over Chrysler’s bailout in 1979-80. The UAW agreed to over $400 million in wage and benefit cuts in order to increase the liquidity of management, for fear of losing jobs for all unionized workers at the company. A far cry from the combative tactics of the 1930s. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/06/uaw-chrysler-officials-agree-on-contract-cuts/c0322164-cd56-4f2c-9280-75deab4e85d3/)
In retrospect, these things can be viewed as prelude to the PATCO strike. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization was the union that represented all federally employed air traffic controllers. It was one of the few unions to endorse Ronald Reagan for president in 1980, and Reagan had endorsed their fight for better working conditions during the campaign. In 1981, PATCO’s contract negotiations with the FAA stalled, and the union calls a strike. Federal employees are legally barred from striking, but the law against such strikes had not been widely enforced, particularly on a union close to the sitting administration. But Reagan declared the strike a “peril to national safety” and demanded they either return to work in 48 hours or he would fire and replace all of them. The deadline passed, PATCO workers were either fired or returned to work outside the protection of PATCO. The FAA is able to avoid a prolonged shutdown of American air traffic, and thus able to beat the strike. (https://www.npr.org/2006/08/03/5604656/1981-strike-leaves-legacy-for-american-workers)
An event that is often sighted as a turning point of the American Labor Movement is the Flint sit-down strike, because it was the first time that the president had ever called out the National Guard in support of labor rather than management. It was the first time labor had the federal government on its side. The PATCO strike was the inverse, a symbol to management that the Reagan Administration would not give political support to the unions.
The breaking of the PATCO strike put a chill on the organizing efforts of American labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics records the number of work stoppages and workers involved in work stoppages every year. (https://www.bls.gov/web/wkstp/annual-listing.htm) Note the sharp decline in stoppages from 1979 (Beginning of Volcker Shock) to 1982 (PATCO strike broken).
The event also served as a green light for management efforts to reign in labor. The most prominent representation of this is the shutting down of factories in the heavily unionized midwest and moving them either to the more anti-union American South or overseas. The way was paved for these plant relocations by the Reagan-Bush free trade efforts that culminated in NAFTA. NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and other free trade efforts were heavily opposed by elements of organized labor - playing a major role in the anti-globalization movement - but not only were these measures enacted, they were made law by Reagan and Bush’s political rivals in the Democratic party. In the 90s the unions were made to see that even if more favorable leadership entered power, labor would not enjoy the sort of political power they had before.
edit: it was the 1958 midterms when Nixon got burned on right to work, not '54
There's a lot of fantastic and well researched replies in here! However, I have a question that hasn't seem to have been covered yet.
A lot of the responses seem to be focused on histories of certain events, organizations, strikes, laws, victories and losses, and that sort of play by play of labor history and the different ideologies/movements it intersects with.
And all of that stuff is great, but I'm wondering if there's any history that talks about how these movements are actually built, how popular support is both built up and deflated, and how this has changed over time. /u/Drugs_and_Anarchy has a fantastic response that touches on this idea and how it relates to immigration policy, and I was hoping for more of that kind of analysis.
For example, I know that early labor activism was brought about simply by industrialization's tendency to concentrate workers into large urban centers, and the act of bringing workers together in shared conditions of toil brought people together to commiserate with one another about their conditions, and this formed the basic motivation to organize with one another to fight for better conditions. And to facilitate this organization, you could have a few people printing up flyers in their spare time to pass around, or even start printing your newspaper once you're a little more organized to spread your ideas around.
So what happened as print fell out of vogue and more and more people turned to mass media as their primary source of information, and how did that effect labor organizers who largely didn't have a voice on these platforms? What are the implications of a work force that is increasingly more and more atomized, and instead of sharing the same conditions with each other we have a labor market that is increasingly dominated by gig economy jobs, temp agencies, and a growing trend of job hopping with fewer people staying in one job for extended periods of time.
The political aspect of this question is fascinating, but I'm also interested how the changing conditions of the world and technology in general affected these movements, and if there's any scholarship that tackles this question from that perspective.
thanking everyone on here who replied, this is some amazing detailed work you all did. Kudos.